Electronic circuits may be manufactured out of a semiconductor material such as silicon. A wafer may be the product of the manufacture. After the manufacture of the wafer the wafer may be cut into chips, and the chips may be packaged with pins to connect the chip to other electronic circuits. The electronic circuits of the chips are often tested prior to being used. The electronic circuits are tested because sometimes the electronic circuits do not operate correctly due to manufacturing faults. Often, a portion of an electronic circuit of a chip may not operate correctly, but other portions of the electronic circuit of the chip may operate correctly and be sold and used. The electronic circuits may include processors such as central processing units, peripheral processing units, digital signal processors, application processors, graphical processing units, shaders, and the like.
Often, the electronic circuits are tested using functional tests where each of the possible functions of the electronic circuits are tested sequentially. Because the number of functions of the electronic circuit may be very large, often only a portion of the possible functions of the electronic circuit are tested. However, even testing a portion of the possible functions of the electronic circuit may be very time consuming and require the use of expensive testing equipment for many minutes. Additionally, when different parts of the electronic circuit can be disabled to try and find portions of the electronic circuit that can be used, the absence of the disabled units will alter the signaling at the electronic device inputs and outputs, increasing the number of custom functional tests required to verify every possible configuration of disabled units, and making it more difficult to perform functional testing.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for an apparatus, computer readable medium, and method of testing processors using cache resident testing.